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OK, I'll be honest with you, I'm probably not the best person to make predictions. I say that because I'm not hugely up to speed with industry news. My interest in Second Life current events really only dates back to the last couple of months, whereas I stopped following telepresence news back in the beginning of the year for various reasons. So these predictions are heavily influenced by my PhD research, and tend to focus on the long-term effects of major events from 2009. So pleeeease don't take these too seriously. I just thought it might be fun to take a shot.

Second Life

The Second Life 'Social' user base will begin to fall.

2010 will be the year that Blue Mars reaches mass-market maturity, that new adult content policies take their toll, and the bot crack down continues to make waves (thanks to Ener and Wizard for pointing that out in the comments of my last post). The increase in the number of low budget PCs and netbooks, also don't bode well for graphically intensive virtual worlds (who knows, maybe we'll even see an official 'light' or web-based client).

Rise in Business Users

Second Life has huge potential as a tool for real-world business collaboration, provided it manages to get over a few reputation issues and learn how to market it well. I think 2010 will see an increase in the amount of businesses giving virtual world communications a shot.

More Bad Press

Linden seems to be pretty good at making unpopular decisions lately as well as failing to deal with piracy issues. I wouldn't be surprised if a few high-profile sellers or community members leave as a result, with various popblogs using them as sufficient evidence to declare SL dead. I think we're due a TV documentary along the same lines too - 'The Rise and Fall of Second Life' maybe?

Also...

If I had to make any far out guesses, I'd say acquisition of Linden if the amount of active residents declines enough. Maybe make that a 2011 or 12 prediction. Other than that, more incentives for premium users, and probably just your standard new feature announcements that everyone will hate, most likely ones relating to money raising attempts, a la Linden Homes or XStreet fees. In a nightmarish (and improbable) 2010 this will take the form of Linden Taxes.

Telepresence

Another year of growth

One thing that we have Cisco's marketting department to thank for is how well they've promoted the concept of telepresence as much as they've promoted their product. They'll continue to do this, and sales will continue to rise for all companies. Guess that's an obvious prediction. But hey, it's a prediction nonetheless.

Cisco moves into Traditional Video Conferencing

With the acquisition of Tandberg now under it's belt, I think it's a safe bet to say that we'll start to see more traditional style video conferencing products bearing the Cisco logo. That's the point when we'll see that their talks about interoperability and standards meant with their own products rather than others. I'm keeping the reasons to myself on this one, but they could screw up really badly here, if they approach it with the same kind of philosophy they did with their translation service (and I was right about predicting FAIL on that one ).

Mainstream Desktop and Consumer Telepresence

Desktop and consumer telepresence will start to make a splash this year, perhaps making it's first mainstream consumer debut towards the mid to end 2010. Although I'd say 12 months is unrealistic to expect it to catch on properly. I'm going to make the suggestion that this will be lead by Logitech with their recent acquisition of LifeSize. The main issue for consumer and desktop telepresence (beyond the concern that it can't even be accomplished ) is the huge adoption speed it needs to be successful. If people don't have anyone else to talk to, why would they buy it.  That wouldn't be a problem for Logitech if they could somehow combine it with their existing webcam range. Perhaps we'll see this done with some third party partner, such as Skype or Microsoft. Maybe even Google Telepresence? :O

3D Telepresence

3D telepresence (of the googles variety) will be demonstrated. It would certainly be an ambitious thing to do and definitely a marvelous thing to see - but it would screw up the user experience hugely. Expect it to come from either Cisco as a marketing gimmick (like they've done with holographic telepresence) or from an unknown.

So that's it... a bunch of predictions ranging from the obvious to the ludicrous. But it's just for fun, I look forward to seeing how many I can tick off this time next year!

(Hopefully) Related posts:

1. No Translations for Cisco Telepresence It’s times like this when I real­ise that maybe I’m actu­ally get­ting some­where with my research. Last year Cisco announced that they were work­ing...
2. Maybe Second Life isn’t that far from Reality A little while ago I stumbled across a very inter­est­ing art­icle in a philo­sophy journal. It spoke about an inter­est­ing the­ory of real­ity, and...
3. Second Life User Activity in 2009 Given that we’ve just passed into a new year, I thought it might be inter­est­ing to take a look at some Second Life stats....
4. Copybotting as ‘intentional human error’ I’ve been read­ing quite a lot of blog posts on the topic of copy­bot­ting recently. For those who don’t know, copy­bot­ting is the blanket...
5. Avatars United — A Sticking-Plaster Solution for Networking in Second Life So I guess almost every­one who’s going to read this post is aware of Linden Labs pur­chase of Avatars United and the assim­il­a­tion of...